Flipkart, the domestic e-retailing giant of India has decided to withdraw its participation from the controversial Airtel Zero platform launched by Bharti Airtel in the first week of April 2015.Though the CEO of Flipkart, Sachin Bansal defended Airtel Zero few days back via twitter but his statements couldn’t justify company’s decision of backing Airtel Zero to the netizens. Right after the move made by Flipkart, company faced prodigious criticism from majority of netizens across all platforms of social media. Not only on social media, Flipkart also faced consequences of its decision through the reviews of its android application on Google Play Store. Android users and those in favor of net neutrality rated Flipkart’s android application least citing its decision to support Airtel Zero as the only reason.

In a statement, the company said, “We at Flipkart have always strongly believed in the concept of net neutrality, for we exist because of internet. Over the past few days, there has been a great amount of debate, both internally and externally, on the topic of zero rating, and we have a deeper understanding of the implications.”

For certain, Flipkart couldn’t go with Bharti Airtel at the cost of its customer and hence decided to walk away from the ongoing discussions with Airtel for their platform Airtel Zero. Airtel had given hint of its intentions when it tried to charge for Over-the-top (OTT) services like Skype, Viber etc in December, 2014 but it took its step backward followed by extreme criticism not by only masses but also by competitors like Vodafone and Idea Cellular. Now, Airtel Zero is being criticized by people who are not in support of discriminated internet in India and might possible that Airtel too faces quite similar reactions just like Flipkart faced from its current consumers in near future.